Since our planned second speaker can't make it, we're calling on our members to give "lightning talks", short talks of just a few minutes on Linux-relevant topics.

Stewart Smith, The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration

Abstract

This a tale of the introduction of continuous integration testing into a well established development team. It covers both the highs and lows and discusses strategies to deal with both the positives and negatives and in turn improve your own software engineering practices.

While setting up a Jenkins instance off in the corner somewhere is relatively simple, changing the organisation and development practices can be much harder while at the same time throwing adequate resources at CI when your budget is nowhere near infinite.

While projects such as OpenStack get a lot of coverage for their continuous integration work, they also have a non-trivial number of people exclusively working on it. In this sesison, I’ll cover how to do something really close with approximately zero spare hours in your day and near zero spare dollars in your budget.

Stewart Smith is the Director of Software Architecture at Percona. He joined Percona in 2011 with a deep background in database internals including MySQL, MySQL Cluster, Drizzle, InnoDB and HailDB.

Prior to joining Percona, Stewart worked at Rackspace on the Drizzle database server focusing on getting it through a
critical milestone of a stable Generally Available (GA) release. Prior to Rackspace, he worked on Drizzle as a member of
the CTO Labs group inside Sun Microsystems.

As one of the founding core developers of the Drizzle database server Stewart has deep expertise in the code base. He had direct involvement in significant refactoring of the database server including removing the FRM, the InnoDB storage engine, xtrabackup, the storage engine API, CATALOG support and countless bug fixes. He also maintains HailDB, a shared library offering a NoSQL C API directly to InnoDB.

At Sun Microsystems, and MySQL before that, Stewart was a Senior Software Engineer in the MySQL Cluster team working on core code and features inside the MySQL Server and the Cluster codebase working on projects such as: geographical asynchronous replication, online add node, online backup, NDBINFO for improved monitoring and the Win32 port.

Parking can be found along or near Royal Parade, Grattan Street, Swanston Street and College Crescent. Parking within Trinity College is unfortunately only available to staff.

For those coming via Public Transport, the number 19 tram (North Coburg - City) passes by the main entrance of Trinity College (Get off at Morrah St, Stop 12). This tram departs from the Elizabeth Street tram terminus (Flinders Street end) and goes past Melbourne Central Timetables can be found on-line at:

Before and/or after each meeting those who are interested are welcome to join other members for dinner. We are open to suggestions for a good place to eat near our venue. Maria's on Peel Street in North Melbourne is currently the most popular place to eat after meetings.

LUV would like to acknowledge Red Hat for their help in obtaining the Buzzard Lecture Theatre venue and VPAC for hosting, and BENK Open Systems for their financial support of the Beginners Workshops

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